Marc Gafni with Howard Bloom [Drawn from conversations between Marc Gafni and Howard Bloom]

Editor & Research Associate: Kerstin Tuschik

This is an early draft of this essay.

A later version of the essay will be part of the forthcoming The Universe: A Love Story series.

Introduction: A New Story of Value in Response to the Meta-Crisis

Decades of research and study have led us to the conclusion, as we will briefly unpack below, that only a New Story of Value can avert unimaginable suffering or worse and change the vector of history towards ever-deepening expressions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As perceptive historians point out, history changes when a compelling New Story [hi-story] emerges that changes the vector of cultural evolution.

Indeed, it is only a New Story that has the capacity to change the course of history. Technology matters. But the story we tell about technology matters as well. Exponential technology matters. But the story we tell about exponential technology matters exponentially more.

Without such a new, shared, evolving Story of Value, our capacity to escape unbearable suffering and, based on hardheaded analysis, even extinction seems, from a human perspective, unlikely. The results of not being able to articulate a New Story of Value are excruciating, both in the level of suffering for billions of human beings, as well as the entire life system—and, more than even all that, for the trillions of lives that will remain unborn.

All of the past depends on us to fulfill its dreams.

All of the present depends on us to live.

All of the future depends on us to be born. 

The overall purpose of this volume, Some Idiosyncratic Remarks on the History of Uniqueness as a First Principle and First Value, and the other volumes of the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism that this volume is part of, is to provide a first articulation of this New Story of Value in the domain of relationship, which, as we will see below, is the core structure of Reality itself.

CosmoErotic Humanism

CosmoErotic Humanism is a world philosophical movement aimed at reconstructing the collapse of value at the core of global culture. Much like Romanticism or Existentialism, CosmoErotic Humanism is not merely a theory but a movement that changes the very mood of Reality. It is an invitation to participate in evolving the source code of consciousness and culture towards a cosmocentric ethos for a planetary civilization.

CosmoErotic Humanism addresses three core questions: Who? Where? What?

• Who am I? Who are we? [Narrative of identity]
• Where are we? [Universe Story]
• What is there to do? What do we want? What is our deepest heart’s desire—both personally and collectively? [Eros and ethos]

This movement is a strong, fluid, and emergent response to the meta-crisis, fundamentally understanding that existential and catastrophic risks are not just rooted in flawed infrastructure (technological and other systems), social structure (law, education, politics), but primarily in failed superstructure—specifically the collapse of an implicit, shared worldview, what we call a shared Story of Value rooted in evolving First Principles and First Values as a context for our diversity.

The core of CosmoErotic Humanism is therefore a new Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values that integrates the validated insights of the interior and exterior sciences—across premodern, modern, and postmodern thought—ultimately recasting cosmic evolution as a Story of Value, in which our stories are understood to be chapter and verse in the larger narrative arc of Reality—the CosmoErotic Evolutionary Love Story of the Intimate Universe.

These evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value are grounded in a comprehensive set of meta-theories, encompassing psychology (and a theory of self), epistemology, scientific metaphysics, education, ethics, theology, mysticism, sexuality, Eros, and ethos.

CosmoErotic Humanism offers some of the first words on the possible emergence of world philosophies and world religions adequate to our time of civilizational crisis and transformation—rooted in a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity, weaving humanity into a shared story of inherent yet evolving Cosmic Value.

The Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism

The monograph you are reading right now is part of a large cultural project, a kind of global genome project, which focuses not on human genetics or genes but on the cultural memetics or memes that animate and define Reality.

We call this the Great Library Project.

The purpose of this Great Library Project is to initiate a new Renaissance, which integrates the leading edges of human wisdom, from the traditional, premodern period, the modern era and the postmodern moment, into a New Story of Value, which evolves the source code of culture and consciousness.[1]

At the core of this New Story of Value are a new Universe Story and a new narrative of identity, which we have called CosmoErotic Humanism and Homo amor. The essence of the new Universe Story and the new narrative of identity derive from the story of I and the story of We. This volume is focused on a pivotal dimension of the New Story of Value—the First Principle and First Value of Uniqueness.

The Ontology of Story: Story Is the Structure of the Real

Postmodernity argues that Reality is merely a story, that no story is better or worse than any other story, and that stories are but social constructs, fictions, or figments of our imagination.[2]

But of course, postmodernity is not only deconstructing the ontology, or Reality, of Story, but also the ontology, or Real Nature of Value.[3]

These deconstructions of Story and Value are true but partial. It is true that there is a plentitude of stories we tell about Reality, and that Story is the underling unit that constitutes Reality. But it is not true that Story is mere fiction. There is a plentitude of stories, not because there is no Real Value or Meaning, but rather because there is a plentitude of Value and Meaning.

Story is the structure of the Real. This is what we have referred to, in other contexts, as the Ontology of Story. Story itself is the source code, not only of culture and consciousness, but of all of Reality all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.[4] It is for that reason that to evolve the Story is to evolve the source code.

Emergent from the recognition of the Ontology of Story is the recognition that we live in inescapable narrative frameworks—Stories of Value—which define the nature and quality of both our personal and collective human lives.

Stories are not merely randomly contrived conjectures. Rather, stories are attempts to gather information, interior and exterior information about the nature of Reality, and translate it into a coherent Story of Value.

Not all stories are equal. There is a hierarchy of stories. In other words, there are better and worse stories.

A better story takes deeper account of more meaning or information, exterior and interior, and weaves that meaning and information together in the most elegant, good, true, and beautiful fashion.

A better story is aligned with more and wider Fields of Value, even as it integrates more contradictions into greater wholes.

A better story weaves a narrative thread that articulates the most coherent and compelling framework that embraces, honors, and uplifts the most-possible people.

A better story must be not only an eternal story—aligned with eternal structures of value—but also an evolving story, aligned with the evolution of value—the evolution of love—the evolution of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

A better story is an eternal and evolving story.

We cannot trust stories that claim to be only eternal stories, or that claim to be ever-evolving stories with no ground in Eternity—in the Real, which is not dependent on the changing mores of time. The more deeply we investigate Cosmos, both in its exterior and interior faces, deploying the interior and exterior sciences, the more accurate—and the better, truer, and more beautiful—story we can tell.[5]

A story with flawed, incomplete, or distorted plotlines can bring us—and indeed has brought us—to the brink of existential risk, the potential end of humanity as we know it. To respond to this meta-crisis, we need to evolve the story, which is to evolve the source code of culture itself.

What Is the Meta-Crisis?

A simple image:

Let’s turn to a cultural artifact, the Death Star in that cinematic classic of the late twentieth, early twenty-first, century—Star Wars.

The Death Star is a battleship armed so intensely that it poses an existential risk—that means that it has the destructive capacity not just to attack and damage but to destroy a planet.

That’s existential risk—risk to our very existence.

There are two forms of existential risk. The potential death of humanity. The death star has the capacity to destroy a planet. Or the death of our humanity. The death star has the capacity to exert totalitarian control over a planet.

The forces of good in the Star Wars narrative don’t have the capacity to engage the Death Star.

Of course, both the death of humanity and the totalitarian control that would lead to the death of our humanity as genuine options are very different in their genealogy than the precise plotline of Star Wars.[6] But that does not matter. The Death Star emerges in culture as a foreshadowing of both forms of existential risk.

The Death Star as a Symbol for a Culture of Death

From the deeper perspective of cultural myth and prophetic symbol, the Death Star is not one weapon. It is a culture. It is a systemic culture of death that leads to intense suffering for the majority of human beings in the present, catastrophic risk in the immediate future, and impending existential risk in the near or intermediate future.

We are now—validated by the most hardheaded analysis from multiple vectors of leading-edge policy and social analysis^[7]—confronted by the Death Star in myriad vectors of distressing disguises. That is quite literally true and self-evident to anyone who has the willingness and capacity to do genuine sensemaking, which begins by reading the serious background material available beneath the headlines.^[8]

There is a realization in the cinematic version—which is not about what the writers were thinking, but it is culture speaking through this epic story—that the only way to take out the Death Star is with a direct hit: A direct hit that gets through all the defenses, all the structural obstacles, and actually explodes culture into a new possibility.

This writing is about one dimension—based on decades of investigation in the interior and exterior sciences—of how we can score that direct hit.

In a word, the direct hit is a New Story of Value. For as we noted at the outset, it is only a New Story of Value that truly changes the course of history.

That New Story of Value is—expressed somewhat differently—a new interior technology of culture. It is this space from which all is generated. The New Story of Value itself is generated by new insights into the nature of Self and Reality. These new insights themselves are often provoked by interior practice and contemplation, which generate the evolution of consciousness. They are also provoked however by new exterior technologies, from the plough to the printing press to the internal combustion engine to the personal computer to social media to machine intelligence driven data sciences.

This book and its sister volume is about one dimension of that New Story of Value, the emergence of a new structure of relationship. In that sense, this book is filled with hope. For hope is a memory of the future. And the future is called into existence by a New Story of Value.

Before we turn to the direct hit, however, we need to understand more deeply the Death Star context. When we are talking about the Death Star, the culture of death, we are talking about, as we already noted, the meta-crisis.

The meta-crisis is what we call the second shock of existence.[i]

The second shock of existence, of course, implies the first shock of existence, with which we will briefly begin.

The First Shock of Existence

The first shock of existence is the realization of the death of the human being; our realization that we will die, which dawns in human consciousness at the beginning of history. We are not talking about the biological fact of death but the existential realization of death.

The existential fear or dread of death begins in the prehistoric period, according to some during the hunter-gathering era,[9] and according to others when we began to have surplus food. In the second reading, it had to do with having time on our hands. We started to think about our lives. We were much less worried than the hunter-gatherers about the elephant or mammoth or lion who was going to kill us potentially this afternoon. This is the natural fear that the human shares with the animal world of biological death. But when that fear became less immediate, the fear of death did not disappear. Rather, we began to think about death not in terms of warding off an immediate threat, but in terms of what we might call the existential fear of death. We thought, Oh my God, I’m going to die. The ego structure—that we developed after we emerged from humanity’s early sense of being almost coextensive with nature—became afraid. The ego sought to arrogate its intuition of immortality to itself, which in reality belonged to Spirit or Essence. The ego desired its own immortality and was therefore shocked by the reality of its impending death. I realize that my personality, family, social status, farming community—with my relatively stable home, identity, and existence—is ephemeral. I am going to die. This is the existential fear of death that we are calling the first shock of existence.

The first shock of existence pressed the human being into disclosing meaning. The fear of death—the encounter with mortality—generated a depth of vision and understanding of human nature that invited the human being into a larger story, where he could, at least in potential, participate in immortality. The fear of death focused our attention inside. When we went inside, we accessed in our own interiors the deepest wellsprings of the interior face of Cosmos. The fear of death generated some of the great beauties and critical movements of value—including ethics, Spirit, and religion—which originally meant religare—to reconnect, to realign with the nature of Reality. So, the fear of death entering Reality generated this explosion of Spirit—a Story of Value, a story about what it means to be a human being in the Cosmos. And this new Story of Value in the premodern period was almost always called religion.

Of course, many of us have left the old religions behind. The intuition of immortality was priceless, but the ticket price demanded by each religion was too high. Every religion claimed in one form or the other that Eternity, or immortality, was available only to its adherents and only in exchange for various forms of submission, which ranged from doctrinal, psychological, theological, political, and economic. We are children of Voltaire, who led the liberation of the corruptions of religion’s many shadows with the battle cry, Remember the Cruelties. And those cruelties were often bound up with the ethnocentric prisms of all the premodern religions, which mediated between human beings and the Infinite.

But we threw out the baby with the bathwater. While we rejected the ways of obedience and submission that were demanded by the religions, their essential intuition—the realization of the first shock of existence, the overwhelming existential fear of death and the need to respond to it—remains powerfully resonant and true.

To transcend the fear of death, post the old religions, we need to make our life a triumph. It is only a well-lived life that does not fear death. But a life well lived is—as consciousness has evolved—no longer reducible to obedience to the dictates of a local God who is alienated from Cosmos and denies human dignity and capacity. Instead, a life well lived is a life aligned with what we have called in CosmoErotic Humanism the eternal yet evolving Values of Cosmos, which themselves transcend death. But it is not only about alignment with those Values, but rather about the incarnation of those Values. In incarnating the eternal yet evolving Values, which transcend death, we most naturally transcend death ourselves. For we are those death-transcending Values ourselves.

Postmodernity, however, moved to savagely deconstruct all previous narratives of the well-lived life, meaning a life rooted in in the personal incarnation of Values aligned with Cosmos. Indeed, postmodernity claimed that the very idea of a well-lived life, a life of intrinsic value, was itself a social construction of Reality, not backed by the Universe.

The Second Shock of Existence

The first shock of existence is the realization of the death of the human being.

The second shock of existence is the realization of the potential death of humanity.

After we have gone through all the stages of history—of matter, life, and mind in all of their stages of evolutionary unfolding—we have come to this place in the evolution of humanity, in which the gap between our exterior technologies in their exponential forms—from atomic bombs to social media to weaponized drones to artificial intelligence—and our failure to develop genuine shared interior technologies of value has created extraction models and exponential growth curves, rivalrous conflicts based on win/lose metrics, as well as complicated, incoherent world systems that, together, create dire existential risk.

A New Grammar of Value as the Context for Our Diversity in Response to the Second Shock of Existence

The second shock of existence must—like the first shock—press us into new gnosis. And at the core of the new gnosis is a new grammar of value—evolving yet eternal value—with which we are aligned—and which we incarnate. Such a new grammar of value engages both the terror of death and the terror of a life lived denuded of intrinsic meaning that is backed by the Cosmos. The new gnosis is the articulation of a new set of First Principles and First Values, eternal yet evolving, embedded in a New Story of Value. The First Principles and First Values are the plotlines of the Universe: A Love Story. The shared grammar of value is the only possible context for a global civilization that is not self-terminating.

This is the deeper sensemaking that seeks to emerge from the second shock of existence.

We don’t only need. at this moment. to be activists to heal the direct crises—be they medical crises, environmental crises, AI threats, or wars. That’s for sure—no questions asked, hands down—the very first thing we need to do. We need to revision our infrastructures and our social structures. That comes before everything. That trumps everything. Anything else would be a failure of intimacy.

But we also dare not to waste the meta-crisis, or it will be the last crisis we are privileged to navigate. We must allow this moment to spur us—to press into our interiors—and invite the second shock of existence into our hearts—not in a way that paralyzes us, but in a way that inspires new levels of insight and realization—precisely the insights and realizations that will be necessary to prevent the second shock of existence from ever actualizing.

Between Utopia and Dystopia

We stand in this moment poised between utopia and dystopia.

A Time Between Worlds: A Time Between Stories

We are at a time between worlds and a time between stories. We need a New Story of Value, eternal yet evolving, rooted in First Principles and First Values, which would become a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.

This is exactly what the Renaissance was—it was a time between worlds and a time between stories. In the Renaissance, we were swept with and challenged by the Black Death, a pandemic that swept Europe. The Black Death destroyed between a third to half of Europe and a huge part of Asia. It killed everyone. People died horrifically, brutally, in the streets. They had no idea how to meet this challenge.

And so, in response to the Black Death, da Vinci, Ficino, and their cohorts understood that they had to tell a New Story of Value—and that story was the story of modernity.

Did they get the story right? They got part of it right, and this birthed, to use Jürgen Habermas’ phrase, the dignities of modernity, the new way of information-gathering, and universal human rights.

To the extent that the stories disqualified interiors, deconstructed the source of value, downgraded the dignity and Eros of human nature and identity, undermined the moral coherence of human communion, and disenchanted the Universe from the rivers of the sacred that nourished its core, they gradually generated the disasters of modernity, all of which together have led us to a point where our very future is at risk.

They lost the basis for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

This basis used to be Divine Revelation:

God told us.

But that Divine Revelation was owned by religion, and every religion had overreached and over-claimed. The revelation was often mediated through cultural categories and wasn’t fully accurate—so, modernity threw out revelation, but was unable to establish a new basis for value. Value was just assumed to be real; as it says in the founding document of the American revolution, the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident—that is, we don’t really have a basis for value, but we just take it as a given.

In other words, modernity took out a loan of social capital from the traditional world.

The source of value has never been worked out, and then, gradually, value began to collapse.

The Universe Story began to collapse.

The belief that the Good, the True, and the Beautiful are Real began to collapse.

The belief that Love is Real began to collapse.

As Bertrand Russell is reported to have said,

I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it.[10]

What do you do if you grew up in a world in which Value is not Real—a world without a source of value, without a Universe Story, without a story of human identity, without a story of desire, without a narrative of power?

In the words of W.B. Yeats, the center cannot hold.[11]

We become the hollow men and the stuffed men, shape without form, gesture without motion.[12]

You have a collapse at the very center of society because you no longer have Eros. You no longer have a Reality in which Value is Real—and so you have this lingering sense of emptiness. You have a complete collapse at the very center—and that’s the source of existential risk.

To sum up:

Without a shared grammar of value, there is no global intimacy, and therefore no global coherence, and no global coordination in response to catastrophic and existential risk, which means—put simply—there will be, quite literally, no future.

Hope Is a Memory of the Future

But we are not hopeless. On the contrary, we are filled with great hope.

Hope is a memory of the future.

That memory of the future is the direct hit that takes down the Death Star—the culture of death.

A Direct Hit Takes Down the Death Star

What’s our direct hit move in response to the Death Star?

How do we respond to imminent existential risk?

The direct hit must be—as it has always been in history—the emergence of a new stage of evolution.

Crisis is an evolutionary driver.

And every crisis is, at its core, a crisis of intimacy.

From the oxygen crisis of the single cells dying at the dawn of life on Earth, which generated a new type of cells that were able to breathe oxygen, and later the emergence of multicellular life,[13] to existential risk in this very moment, all crisis is a crisis of intimacy.

We demonstrate this principle in some depth in the writings of CosmoErotic Humanism.[14]

The direct hit, therefore, is—structurally and self-evidently—to evolve intimacy itself. Intimacy is always rooted in a Shared Story of Value. A crisis of intimacy, at its core, is a crisis in value. To evolve intimacy is therefore to evolve a New Story of Value. A new—emergent—Shared Story of Value generates a new—emergent—global intimacy.

More Adequate and Compelling Interior Technologies

Another way to articulate the story we are telling:

The generator functions of existential and catastrophic risk are the direct results of the failure to develop more adequate interior technologies that are sufficiently compelling to displace rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics as the motivational architecture—in myriad forms—for the human lifeworld. This has led to the conditions for the essential implosion of our social and ecological systems. These systems are already—and quite literally—on the brink of collapsing themselves.

That’s what we mean by the second shock of existence.

To recapitulate:

The second shock of existence is not the realization of the death of the human being; the second shock of existence is the realization of the potential death of humanity. It is the second shock of existence that is the Death Star moment of our species.

The Global Intimacy Disorder

But there is a deeper root cause for existential and catastrophic risk that lurks underneath these important generator functions, which we articulated above: rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics and the fragile systems they engender.

And we cannot take the Death Star down without discerning and addressing this deeper root cause. We have already alluded to this deeper root cause above, in our invocation of interior technologies that are sufficient to displace the current civilizational architecture of rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, which generates fragile systems.

But at this point, we need to make the root cause, and from that the root response, more explicit and clearer.

The deeper root cause of the meta-crisis is a global intimacy disorder.

This ostensibly surprising statement can be understood in a few simple steps:

• All of the catastrophic and existential risk challenges we face are GLOBAL challenges—from climate change to artificial intelligence, to pandemics, to systems collapse, to the exponential arms races of exponential weaponized technologies.
• All of these factors are driven by the tragedies of the commons, multipolar traps, and races to the bottom[15]—all of which are expressions of the rivalrous conflict meta-architecture, and all of which generate fragile systems subject to multiple forms of gradual or sudden collapse.
• Every global challenge SELF-EVIDENTLY requires a global solution.
• Global solutions can only be implemented with global co-ordination.
• Global co-ordination is impossible without global coherence.
• Global coherence is only possible if there is resonance between the parts—global resonance.
• Global resonance is only possible if we have global intimacy.
• Global intimacy—just like intimacy in a couple—is only possible when there is a shared story—not just a shared history but a shared story—guiding us into the future. It is only a shared global story that can generate a new emergent quality of intimacy—global intimacy.
• A shared story must be a Shared Story of Value.
• A Shared Story of Value is rooted in shared ordinating values, or what we have called Evolving First Values and First Principles. Intimacy requires a shared grammar of values as a matrix for a Shared Story of Value.
• It is only a shared global story that heals and generates a new emergent quality of intimacy—global intimacy.
• Without a shared grammar of values, there is no global intimacy, and therefore no global coherence, and no global coordination in response to catastrophic and existential risk; the latter of which means—put simply—there will quite literally be no future.

Brief Recapitulation: The Global Intimacy Disorder Is the Root Cause of the Second Shock of Existence

The global intimacy disorder is the root cause of the second shock of existence—existential risk. It is the global intimacy disorder that underlies its core generator functions as we have described them above. The global intimacy disorder is rooted in the failure to experience ourselves in a Field of shared intrinsic Value—a Shared Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values. This failure itself derives from the deconstruction of value that has been one of the defining characteristics of modernity and postmodernity.[16]

Responding to Existential and Catastrophic Risk: Between the Death of Humanity and the Death of Our Humanity

It is crucial to locate the conversation around the Universe: A Love Story, Eros,[17] Outrageous Love,[18] and uniqueness in the larger context of the meta-crisis, or what has also been termed existential and catastrophic risk, to which this writing, in part, responds.

We have outlined, in multiple writings on CosmoErotic Humanism, two distinct forms of the meta-crisis:

The first is the pending death of humanity—some form of extinction or collapse.[19]

The second is the pending death of our humanity.[20]

The Death of Our Humanity Is the Death of Our Uniqueness

The death of our humanity is intrinsically related to the death of our uniqueness. The death of our humanity will be a result of some form of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism of all forms aims to kill uniqueness.

The murder of Winston’s Unique Self may be well formulated as the plot of Orwell’s 1984.

It is the repressive murder of human uniqueness that defines closed societies.

But the murder of uniqueness also takes place in the more covert forms of totalitarianism, as they express themselves in ostensibly open societies. They may express themselves, for example, in various forms of ostensibly benign techno-totalitarianism—what we have called, in a full-length book bearing that name, TechnoFeudalism.[21]

The goal of these more subtle forms of techno-totalitarian vectors in society is often ostensibly noble. It is an expression of a kind of techno-optimism that recognizes the genuine risks that societies face and seeks to transform society through technological means for the sake of its salvation.

These ostensibly noble motivations, however, mix strangely with the precise opposite of what writers like our friend John P. Mackey have called Conscious Capitalism^[22] or Al Gore has referred to as sustainable capitalism.^[23] Indeed, corrupt forms of what Mackey calls crony capitalism^[24] have disproportionate power, binding both government, media, science, and medicine to their own corrupt agendas of outsized power and dominance.

Ivan Illich, to cite but one example, in his important volume Medical Nemesis, describes the horror of what can only be labelled as a medical industrial complex.^[25] At the core of the medical industrial complex, is, as we have articulated it with our colleagues at the think tank Drs. Venu and Vinay Julapalli, a top-down, command-and-control administrative system, built on the denial of what we have called Unique Self Medicine.^[26] Unique Self Medicine is a medicine that speaks to and engages—medically, diagnostically, and existentially—the Unique Self of the person, in terms of their total being, lifestyle, and practice.

The tragic result of the way medicine is practiced today, disassociated from a larger set of First Principles and First Values, is the generation of what can only be described as a culture of unnecessary suffering and death for huge swaths of the world population.

Another, perhaps even more insidious downgrading of uniqueness is the gradually unfolding story of what has been called the Great Reset to describe creeping forms of techno-totalitarianism. It is of course true that the Great Reset, as a term and as a description, has been irresponsibly hijacked and told in wildly uneven renditions of integrity, ranging from incisive and accurate to unhinged and conspiratorial.[27] It is also true, however, that the affixing of the term conspiratorial to a position has itself been deployed to debunk what are in fact credible positions.

Some accurately told stories of a creeping techno-totalitarianism have been told by computer scientist Jaron Lanier in his Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,^[28] Brett Frischman in his Re-Engineering Humanity,^[29] and Shoshana Zuboff in her Surveillance Capitalism.^[30] While each of those books is decisively flawed, both in the diagnosis of the social illness and therefore in the social cures they offer—as we have pointed toward in our own writing on TechnoFeudalism and Value—the general story of corruption they paint is searingly accurate.

The goal of TechnoFeudalism, in its major centers—think MIT media lab for example—is, as we have identified in careful research, the transformation of the private and public space into a kind of global Skinner box.^[31] A Skinner box means the creation of a total environment where (originally) the rats or pigeons (and in the global Skinner box the humans) are controlled by invisible schedules of negative or positive reinforcement—shocks and rewards—that invisibly condition or program their behavior.

The result of this Skinner box conditioning is what B.F. Skinner calls radical behaviorism.

Techno-Feudalism and the Murder of Unique Self

As we have pointed out in our Techno-Feudalism volumes,^[32] the undermining of human uniqueness—what we might accurately call the murder of Eros or the murder of Unique Self—is key to the program.

The MIT media lab, covertly modelling itself—intentionally and directly—on twenty-three key principles of Skinner’s,^[33] euphemistically calls the transformation of the world space into a Skinner box by the techno-positive term living lab. The world needs to be, says Alex Pentland, the director of the MIT Media lab for decades, turned into a living laboratory, where we have real time information and can insert real time controls, conditioning, and reinforcements to invisibly control populations.

For Pentland, this transformation of the world into a Skinner box will be accomplished by the Internet of Things. Technology is, in this scenario, which is rapidly becoming the new human context, transformed from a mere tool to an immersive environment of upgraded algorithms, which downgrades human beings.

The particular methodology of the Skinner box, the worldwide living laboratory, is—as both Skinner and Pentland point out—a multi-tiered mundane process. And that very process—as we have described extensively in our TechnoFeudalism—results in the murder of Unique Self.

The Hijacking and Homogenization of Unique Attention as the Death of Our Humanity

At the core of Unique Self is the unique capacity to place and receive attention.

Attention itself is a core structure of Eros. Eros itself, desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness, is in one sense the capacity to uniquely place and receive attention. It is that unique placing of attention and that unique receiving of attention that are uniquely alluring. There is no Eros without uniqueness, attention, and allurement.

And all of these dimensions of Reality—Eros, uniqueness, attention, and allurement—are what we have identified in CosmoErotic Humanism as evolving First Principles and First Values of Cosmos. They are part of a universal grammar of value, which is the context for our unique diversity as well as for our coordination—our unique intimate communions.

All of these qualities—Eros with its attention, uniqueness, and allurement—evolve and appear in distinct form at the human level of Reality. But they are evolved Values of Cosmos itself.

It is in this precise sense that the hijacking and/or homogenization of attention—rooted in the downgrading of our capacities for unique allurement—which is the core action mode of TechnoFeudalism—are direct and deadly expressions of the death of our humanity.

The Hidden Scientific Bias Against Uniqueness

The undermining of uniqueness that is core to Skinner’s and Pentland’s techno-feudalist project is rooted in the bias against uniqueness that is built into the current structure of mainstream science.

As we noted in TechnoFeudalism, both Pentland and his hidden teacher Skinner are attempting in their Social Physics—a term deployed by Pentland but drawn from Skinner and even earlier from Auguste Comte—to imitate classical physics. And science—in particular physics, but also biology and especially sociology and anthropology—is inherently structured to overlook uniqueness. For science is always—in part appropriately—searching for statistical patterns that transcend particulars. So, science looks to generate general rules, and homogenized groups, and treats them as if every individual is equal—but they are not.[34]

Part of the search for general principles is related to a core methodology of modern science—the movement from Aristotle’s classification to Kepler’s and Galileo’s measurement. Both methodologies are biased against uniqueness but measurement much more decisively so. Science, resourced by power structures of modernity seeking to both benefit humanity and increase their hegemony, began to self-define itself as being inexorably connected with measurement.

Particularly, science seeks to measure common patterns. But of course, measurement of commonness as the default movement of science by definition caused uniqueness to be overlooked at best or more likely to be obfuscated, denied, or distorted. Measurement is a movement toward de-uniqueness. Moreover, measuring instruments themselves trick one into thinking that unique parts are fungible and replaceable when in fact they are not.

Eros Generates Uniqueness

Uniqueness, and what we have called in other writings irreducible uniqueness, is so crucial because it is actually the condition and conduit for our ever-evolving freedom, our ontological dignity, or even what some, including our materialist mystic science colleague Howard Bloom, might call the spirit—or Eros, value, or meaning—that breathes us.

In the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, we simply say that uniqueness is the currency of Eros. This expresses itself in at least two—ostensibly contradictory but in fact—paradoxical ways:

1. First, uniqueness is the currency of divine individuation.[35]
2. And second—as we will point towards again below—uniqueness is also the currency of connection.

Or said slightly different, uniqueness is an essential part of the structure of Cosmos that generates both radical individuation and intimate communion all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

Or said again slightly differently, it is uniqueness, which is the methodology of the ongoing process of differentiation and integration, that is, as Herbert Spencer reminded us,^[36] the core pulsation of evolution.

On the human level, it is the movement from unconscious to conscious uniqueness, coupled with ever-greater depths of uniqueness, that is the wondrous expression of ever-deeper individuated human value—human goodness, truth, and beauty—all in unique human form. But at the very same time, uniqueness is the very ground of our allurement to each other, and particularly of the depth and quality of our unique allurements—our unique Eros—our great loves.

In the following short idiosyncratic essay, we will discuss uniqueness as a fundamental quality of what we have alternately called the amorous Cosmos, the Intimate Universe, the Universe: A Love Story, Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe, or the CosmoErotic Universe. This new, scientifically compelling Universe Story integrates the leading-edge insights of traditional, modern, and postmodern wisdom. And it states that the inherent telos of Reality, which is the very Eros of existence expressed through the incessant creativity of the evolutionary process, is the generation of the twin intentions of Reality:

• the wondrous goodness, truth, and beauty of irreducibly unique individuation and
• the wondrous goodness, truth, and beauty of irreducibly unique intimate communion.

Said slightly differently, we are simply affirming that uniqueness is not an arbitrary social expression. Rather, uniqueness is a value. But not just a contrived or constructed value. Rather, uniqueness is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos. But like all First Principles and First Values of Cosmos, it is an evolving First Principle and First Value.^[37] That is to say, the history of Cosmos is, from one very distinct—unique—perspective, the history of the evolution of uniqueness itself.

There is a full-length book that needs to be written on the history of uniqueness. We will avoid the quite alluring temptation to stop everything, all other writings on CosmoErotic Humanism, and write that monograph right now. But it does indeed need to be written.

Indeed, there is a need for at least a book-length treatment of the history of every First Principle and Value of Cosmos.

Every one of the much-needed monographs on each of the distinct First Principles and First Values needs to address both the value itself and the evolution of that value in the course of evolutionary history.

Minimally, such a monograph would trace the value down to the depths of the lifeworld and then move from the world of life, the biosphere, to the world of the self-reflective human mind, and through all of the levels—the structure stages of consciousness—that constitute the evolving history of life and mind.

But maximally, such a history would begin not with the biosphere but the physiosphere, not with life but with matter, and then move from matter to life to mind, from the physiosphere to the biosphere to the noosphere, from physics to biology to culture.

The split between matter and life, while important in the way that science has set it up, is also relative. Meaning, for example, in the case of uniqueness, we need not just a technical history of where uniqueness begins in Cosmos—although that itself is hugely important—but we need a careful look as well at the evolution of uniqueness.

In this essay, we attempt a first overview of the history of uniqueness, to introduce the dimension of uniqueness as a key strand of value of the fabric of the Amorous Cosmos.

A Partial List of Evolving First Principles and First Values of Cosmos

These First Principles and First Values of Reality include but are not limited to:

• Eros
• value
• intimacy
• consciousness
• desire
• need
• uniqueness and sameness
• attention
• attraction and repulsion (allurement and autonomy)
• harmony or fairness
• freedom and choice
• telos (purpose)
• story
• mystery and gnosis [certainty and uncertainty]
• creativity and transformation
• evolution
• paradox or opposites joined at the hip
• first-, second-, and third-person perspectives
• past, present, and future.

What we are calling First Principles and First Values of Cosmos are not identical but also not unrelated to what our friend Howard Bloom calls Ur patterns. By a First Principle and First Value we refer to a pattern, structure, simple first rule, or axiom of Cosmos—a value of Cosmos, which is present in Reality all the way up and very far down the evolutionary chain, often from right after the Big Bang.

We listed here some nineteen evolving First Principles and First Values. All of those qualities or values are recognizable in the human world. All those qualities are obviously significantly evolved in the human world. And they have different interior and exterior qualities in the human world than they do in the earlier world of the biosphere or the physiosphere (life and matter).

So, there is self-evident discontinuity between the way these First Principles and First Values appear in the worlds of matter, life, and the depth of the self-reflective human mind. And yet, there is also substantive continuity between these worlds. Our friend Howard Bloom affirms this in the way he deploys the term metaphor^[38]—but not mere metaphor, rather a metaphor that works because it points to a level of continuity between matter, life, and mind. Because in some real sense, his Ur patterns and our evolving First Principles and First Values are inherent in the ever-evolving structure of Cosmos.

For example, in our language, when the allurement and attention space is part of the evolving value structure of particles and molecules, particles and molecules generate unique fields of allurement, even as particles and molecules are uniquely allured. And we are constituted by uniquely allured particles and molecules, which means that these fields of unique allurement live in us, as us, and through us.

While we are self-evidently not reducible to particles and molecules, their interior and exterior reality constitutes us. We participate in the particles and molecules of which we are made; those particles and molecules are in us. So that Reality lives in us, just like we live in Reality.

Evolving First Principles and First Values vs. AI, Postmodernism, Value, and Evaluation

In this sense, we are—and this is immeasurably significant—utterly distinct from AI and its computational power, which is not constituted by self-organizing particles and molecules with their unique fields of attention and allurement that are self-actualizing into larger wholes. It is the interiors that constitute us, which themselves inhere within Value that makes us potentially trustworthy in our evaluations. Said slightly differently, all the First Principles of Cosmos in their evolved forms live in us, as us, and through us, and thus, we become participants in the Field of Value.

For example, the value of uniqueness, which lives in proto form, as we will see, all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain, actually lives in us. It is only the honoring of that evolving First Principle and First Value of Uniqueness that allows for—what we have called in CosmoErotic Humanism—our anthro-ontological[39] intuition of that value to make us trustworthy in our evaluations.

AI Bypasses the Field of Value

In essence, AI bypasses our very experience of value, and yet the momentum of the future is our turning to AI for virtually all of our significant evaluations.

AI is raw computational power that bypasses the Field of Value. It is however not insignificant that when querying AI about value, it cannot respond with a felt sense of value but instead regurgitates the postmodern deconstruction of value as normative and authoritative. This depends of course on the data it is trained on, which is in turn related to the worldviews of its trainers/developers. Contemporary public AI, by its nature and programming, bypasses value.^[40]

This does not need to be the case. We can code AI to integrate and take seriously the realization of the Tao that Value is Real and that we participate in a Field of Value. That, however, is not the general direction of AI, to major in understatement.

What Does ChatGPT Know about Value?

As this essay is being completed, the new GPT-3 language processor of AI, having made several key leaps in function in the last years, has just launched a free Open AI program called ChatGPT.

We asked it three simple questions.

Is value real?

Is love real?

Is uniqueness a value?

To summarize the answers—at least from an ontological perspective—what is really Real—the answer was to all three questions, NO.

Is Value Real?

Value is a subjective concept that refers to the importance or worth that someone attaches to something. It is not an objective property of a thing, but rather a judgment or evaluation made by a person. Different people can have different values and assign different levels of value to the same thing.

In economics, value is a fundamental concept that refers to the utility or usefulness of a good or service to an individual or society. It is often used to measure the worth of something in terms of the satisfaction or benefit that it provides.

In general, value is a multifaceted and complex concept that can be understood and evaluated in different ways depending on the context and the values and priorities of the person making the evaluation.

The simple point is that value is clearly not Real. Rather, value is considered not to be an objective property—or an intrinsic Reality. In other words, to give but one example, according to the oracle of Open AI,^[41] goodness is not ultimately Real but based on a merely subjective set of evaluations that is never grounded in an intrinsic Field of Value or Meaning. That which is Real in the modern or postmodern programming and training of AI is that which is measurable. Value as a Reality therefore only exists for the oracle of AI in an economic context when we are talking about a measurable valuation.

Is Love Real?

Love is a complex mix of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person. It can also include deep romantic or sexual attraction. Love is an important part of many people’s lives and can play a role in relationships, friendships, and families. While the exact definition of love may vary from person to person, it is a real emotion that people experience and can have a significant impact on their lives.

Notice that love is not considered an objective property, and the emphasis is on its subjectivity. Love is based on the context, values, and priorities of the person making the evaluation around love.

While that is true, it is also highly partial. There is a refusal to simply articulate the anthro-ontological truth that Love is a Real Value of Cosmos or, in the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, that Reality is Eros all the way down and the way all the way up the evolutionary chain.

Notice as well that love is understood as having no genuine ground at all. It is not only that we may have multiple overlapping definitions of love (or Eros), but that love—and what we mean by love being Real—varies from person to person. In other words, there may be millions or billions of definitions of love, in which case it is irrelevant as a concept. There is no sense of a shared Field of Eros, or Ground of Love, as a Value of Reality. For Open AI, love is not the ground of existence but mere human sentiment.

Of course, we know—anthro-ontologically and linguistically—that this is not the case. Our capacity to even deploy the word love as a central verb in communicative actions already discloses that love does evoke at least a general shared Field of Meaning and Value.

Is Uniqueness a Value?

Uniqueness can be viewed as a value in some contexts. For example, in the arts, uniqueness is often highly valued because it allows for the creation of original, innovative works that stand out from the crowd. In the business world, uniqueness can also be seen as a value because it can help a company differentiate itself from competitors and potentially gain a competitive advantage.

However, it’s important to note that uniqueness is not always seen as a positive value. In some cases, being too unique or different can be perceived as a liability or disadvantage, particularly if it makes it difficult for others to understand or relate to a person or product. It’s also worth noting that not all values are universally held, and what is considered valuable can vary significantly depending on the context and the individual or group that holds the value.

Or in Another Formulation of the Same Question: Is Uniqueness a Real Value?

Uniqueness is a concept that is often used to describe the fact that something is one of a kind, or distinct from other things. It can be considered a real value in the sense that it is a quality or attribute that something possesses, and it can be evaluated or measured in some way. For example, someone might say that a particular painting is unique because it has a style or approach to art that is different from anything else that they have seen. In this sense, uniqueness is a real value because it is a characteristic of the painting that can be objectively observed and described.

In other words, uniqueness as quality or value of Reality is denied. Uniqueness as a measurable property just like any other objective property is embraced. The premise is the same. Only that which is objectively measurable is real.[42]

The Premature Rejection of Value by the Academy

The Move from Eternal & Preordained Value to Eternal & Evolving Value

Of course, the rejection of Value itself as a value, and of Love and Uniqueness as values, is based on two factors that defined modern and later postmodern consciousness. The first is the well-known philosophical critique of value, as falsely claiming to be pre-ordained and eternal. In this sense, declare the mainstream voices of the academy in modernity from Hume through Sartre to Skinner, love is indeed not a value. For how one expresses love in the fifth century BCE in certain cultures may be markedly different from how love is expressed in western culture in 2023.

To claim therefore that love is an objective value would seem to be fallacious and even absurd. For love self-evidently is not eternal in the sense of being pre-ordained. Rather, love evolves. It is this premise that has animated the modern and postmodern mainstream assumptions about value, and it is this premise that informs the Open AI oracle.

Our response, which we have thought through for over a decade, as we have formulated CosmoErotic Humanism, is almost self-evident, once articulated, in its second simplicity[43]—but it is no less compelling because of it:

Love is eternal, and love evolves.

Love evolves, however, within its own vector of meaning and value. Love or, to use the term we prefer in CosmoErotic Humanism, Eros, is Real. That is what we mean by Eros, or Love, is Eternal. It does not mean however that Eros never changes over the course of everlasting time. For Eternity, as Ludwig Wittgenstein already pointed out, does not mean everlasting time. Rather, Eternity means that which is beneath space and time—in the realm of the Eternal. Love as an expression of the Field of Eternal Value means simply that Love, or Eros, is Real.

And that Reality of Eros evolves. Indeed, the depth, breadth, and width of one’s love, including one’s circle of Eros or love, self-evidently evolve. Indeed, the way Eros expresses itself evolves through all the stages of matter, life, and mind.

Eros also, however, has continuity across all these domains. In other words, the word Eros, or Love, has a common meaning across all platforms and domains.

That means that, even as its application evolves, the meaning, and the value, of Cosmos that Eros or Love implies is both Real and constant, or continuous.

In CosmoErotic Humanism, we formulate the Eros equation as an expression of its meaning across historical epochs and cultures:

Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, desiring, moving towards, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. [44]

This Eros equation applies across cultures and across the ages. In other words, there is a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity—the many understandings and shapes that Value, in this case Eros, takes across space and time. This is true for each of the First Values and First Principles. There is a general value equation for each First Principle and First Value, which is part of the universal grammar of value that is a context for our diversity—even as each of the First Principles and First Values evolves. Hence, they are termed evolving First Principles and First Values.

The second reason Value was rejected is that you cannot see or measure Value. True Value is, by its very nature, immeasurable or what we might even call priceless. Modernity’s great move, with wondrous practical effect and equally devastating interior effect, was to assert that what was real was the measurable. This is what Lewis Mumford famously referred to as the disqualification of the universe.

In this sense, modernity limited the sense of Reality to that which could be seen—and measured—through the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind. The Eye of the Senses refers to the classic sensory perception of the five senses and all of their amplifiers, while the Eye of the Mind refers to the perception of the mind—think mathematics, logic, and other forms of reasoning, and all of their amplifiers. By amplifiers we refer to anything that amplifies the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind, for example, a microscope, an FMRI machine, or even the Hubble telescope.

Modernity, and postmodernity in its wake, however, disqualified as real all that cannot be seen—by the Eye of the Senses or the Eye of the Mind—and measured. Said simply, as we have unpacked in other writings,^[45] modernity rejected the enormous data of the Eye of Consciousness. The Eye of Consciousness includes what the Sufi’s called the Eye of the Heart, what the interior sciences called the Eye of Contemplation, what we have also called the Eye of Value, and what some interiors sciences also call the Eye of the Spirit. All these forms of the Eye of Consciousness are predicated on what we have called the Anthro-Ontological Method.

Anthro-Ontology is the capacity of the human being to directly access the Field of Consciousness, or what have also referred to as the Field of Value. Anthro-Ontology, which we have discussed in some depth in other writings, is premised on the empirical realization that we participate directly in the Field of Value. Value, or consciousness, lives in us. We live in a value-laden Intimate Universe, animated by its evolving First Principles and First Values embedded in a Story of Value. The First Principles and First Values are the plotlines of this Intimate Universe—this Amorous Cosmos—which itself is a story animated by telos and Eros. Or said differently, we live in a Telerotic Universe.

And we are not talking about some externally imposed telos but rather about the inherent telos of Reality that is allured to its own greater mysterious wholeness. Reality is inexplicable, even in terms of its most basic science, without recognizing the ceaseless inherent creativity of Cosmos, which is allured to its own greater wholeness. This is a position, which is neither regressive premodern fundamentalist, which imposes a dogmatic storyline on Cosmos, nor is it postmodern fundamentalist, which reduces Cosmos to mere random chance with no inherent value or telos.

It must of course be stated clearly that the plotline of the Universe Story is not exhausted in one lifetime, or even necessarily in one dimension of Reality. But the experience of the First Principles and First Value as the plotlines of Reality, in which we participate, which animate and allure us, are the anthro-ontological Reality of both our Eros and ethos.

We live in a Field of Value, and the Field of Value lives in us. And it is the Eye of Value that gives us direct access to the Field.

The Eros Equation and the Uniqueness Equation

In the case of Eros, as we noted above, we have formulated an Eros equation to articulate that meaning.

The equation, in its simple form, reads:

Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, moving towards, desiring ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness, which yields in its wake ever-more creativity and transformation.

We have formulated equations, or sometimes simply formulations or definitions, for each of the evolving First Principles and First Values.

For uniqueness, we formulated the following simple equation:

Uniqueness = the emergence of distinct value from the larger Field of Value, which is a new whole greater than the sum of the previous parts.[46]

This is the core uniqueness equation. The equation describes the value of uniqueness. Value, however, is always evolving value. The value of uniqueness evolves over time. One perspective on evolution is the evolution of First Principles and First Values. Thus, one plotline of evolution is therefore the evolution of the First Principle and First Value of Uniqueness.

Uniqueness, of course, as we just noted above, does not live alone as a First Principle and First Value. Rather, First Values and First Principles come in clusters. There is an entire primary set of inter-included First Principles and First Values, without which uniqueness cannot stand. These include, among others, drawn from the list above, the First Principles and First Values of:

• Sameness or Commonness,
• Value itself, which might also be called Meaning,
• Story, or narrative arc, or what might be called telos or direction,
• Evolution, or what might also be called Desire or Allurement,
• Intimacy, the movement towards ever-deeper shared identities or intimate communions.

Evolving First Principles and First Values as Plotlines of the Universe: A Love Story

First Principles and First Values themselves are what we have called the plotlines of Cosmos. This itself is based on the realization that Reality is not merely a fact but a story. There is a narrative structure to Reality.

Reality, however, is not an ordinary story but a love story, a story of Eros evolving towards ever deeper and wider expressions. Reality is not an ordinary love story but an Evolutionary Love Story. Meaning, we are not talking about ordinary love as a social contrivance or construction but about the Eros that animates the four forces and all of the other interior and exterior drivers of Cosmos.

And like every story, the Evolutionary Love Story has a plotline. And its plotlines are the evolving First Principles and First Values of Cosmos.

So, Cosmos moves not just towards ever-greater complexity—which is true from an exterior perspective—but also towards more and more uniqueness. Uniqueness is both an exterior objective reality as well as an interior value.

The Dialectic of Sameness and Uniqueness

And uniqueness always appears in the context of—and in dialectical relationship to—sameness. We all share in common both our uniqueness and our sameness. It is precisely the dialectic between sameness and uniqueness that generates new intimate communions of ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholes, which are the Eros and engine of evolution.

This is true about the classical evolutionary process, the movement from hadrons to atoms, to molecules, to macromolecules, to single-celled bacteria, to multicellular organisms, and all the way up the evolutionary chain.

But it is also true of personal and collective, social evolution. New wholeness, new integrations of different split-off or emergent dimensions of our interior self, and new unions between selves and groups of selves are always primary engines of Eros and evolution.

The History of Uniqueness: A First Look

The history of uniqueness is the movement towards more complex and more subtle uniqueness with more and more interiority, more and more distinction, and then more and more consciousness of that very uniqueness. When, as we noted above, Herbert Spencer in his important work First Principles, spends chapter fifteen describing differentiation and integration as an example of such a First Principle, he is describing uniqueness as one of the plotlines—the narrative arc—of Cosmos:

• Differentiation is the movement of evolution towards more and more uniqueness.
• Integration is how ever-greater uniqueness is the ground for ever-deeper contact and wholeness—ever-greater intimate communions.

And of course, as we noted above, these two qualities of uniqueness, the movement towards differentiation—ever-more distinction and autonomy—and the movement towards integration—ever-more merging and communion into a larger whole—are inseparable from each other. Indeed, they are opposites joined at the hip—which itself is also a structural First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.

The Dialectical Paradox of Evolving Uniqueness: More Unique Individuation and More Unique Intimate Communion

This truth is directly accessible through the interior sciences of uniqueness. For example, when Howard talks to Marc, a dimension of Howard-ness emerges that will not appear in any other context. And the converse is equally true. Now, let’s follow this Howard-Marc example to its unique conclusion, which might be something like the following:

The more Howard and Marc are individuated in their irreducible uniqueness—

not in an inflated form of egoic assertion of separateness

but along the more in-depth lines of authentic uniqueness—

unique expressions of the larger Field, in which they both consciously participate,

the more they will elicit not only a unique depth in each other,

which is a function of their respective Unique Self,

but the unique depth

that is an expression of their unique relationship or allurement.

There is a dimension of Howard evoked by Marc,

and of Marc evoked by Howard,

that no one else that ever is, was, or will be can evoke.

What that means is that,

when uniqueness meets uniqueness,

uniqueness is amplified.

Infinity produces polarities of uniqueness that generate ever-deeper unions.

Uniqueness generates three realities in the context of Eros.

First and second, uniqueness generates ever-more crystalized uniqueness in each of the participants in the encounter.

And third, uniqueness also generates the ever-deepening uniqueness of the space in-between, the unique quality of the unique encounter itself.

Said in the language of Unique Self Theory:

In a Unique Self Encounter at the human level, each of the partners in the encounter are holding a piece of the other’s story. And by story we mean not necessarily new action, but rather the depth of a unique quality that imbues every action of that partner in the Unique Self Encounter. And the part of their respective stories that is deepened is the unique story of the encounter itself.

The Infinite Intimate and the Ever-Evolving Birth of New Uniqueness

This structure of uniqueness and sameness—distinction and union—is, as we have already noted, structural to Cosmos. Mathematician and philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead notes this when he talks about the three properties of Cosmos, as:

• the one
• the many
• the creative advance into novelty—or what we are calling uniqueness.

The interior sciences engage the inquiry of why the One generates the many.

Why not just be the One?

Of course, this is not an inquiry to which we can respond with the kind of clarity that removes the mystery. Rather, we engage this mystery of emergent uniqueness by inquiring anthro-ontologically. In other words, how does the mystery of uniqueness play in our own interior experience, which participates in the wider Field of the Mystery?

The leading edges of the interior sciences respond to this Koan-like inquiry in two primary ways, which, in the deepest of contemplations, are finely entwined in a larger single dynamic of Cosmos.

The Shocking Self-Recognition of Infinity in the Unique Face of the Intimate Other

First, the Infinite manifests finitude, because the Infinite is the Infinite Intimate, desiring, yearning for, the experience of ever wider and deeper intimate communions and erotic unions.^[47] The One becomes the unique many, because the One yearns for intimacy.

Second, Infinity expresses itself as billions of expressions of irreducible uniqueness—unique faces—through which the One experiences its own shocking self-recognition.

In other words, the Infinite itself recognizes more of itself through its own self-recognition in its unique faces, even as the Infinite—who we have referred to in CosmoErotic Humanism as the Infinite Intimate—becomes more whole through its ever-deeper experiences of intimate communion and erotic union.

Uniqueness as Cause for Revelation

But it is even more than that. When we unpack the full implications of uniqueness and its implicitly emergent properties, it means that there is a new emergent property of the Real that has never existed before and will never exist, in this precise unique expression, ever again. Or said differently, uniqueness emerges ever-new value. Or in the language of our friend Howard Bloom, uniqueness, and ever-evolving uniqueness at the human level, is a search engine of the Cosmos.^[48]

At the most evolved human level of identity that we currently know, the emergence of Unique Self, we might say that: Every clarified Unique Self generates a shocking emergence and self-recognition of Infinity that, from the perspective of the manifest, could not be caused in any other way. This is true in precisely the same way that every one of your in-depth real friends evokes that unique dimension of you that no one and nothing else could evoke.

Uniqueness is cause for revelation. That’s what uniqueness does, which is both good, true, and quite beautiful.

Our friend Howard likes to tell the story of his friend Chris, who has created some incredible genius-level television series. Chris was on the phone with Howard during one of the weeks that Howard and Marc were discussing this issue. Chris used to look forward to Friday nights when he would go to a particular bar with different individual friends. Gradually, however, they all got married, and Chris remained single. His friends stopped showing up at the bar. And Chris called Howard sadly late one night and said,

You are a different person with each of your friends… and when you lose that friend, you lose that unique aspect of yourself.

Why would a Cosmos produce so much uniqueness—so many unique expressions?

Again, because it is putting out as many feelers as it possibly can into the realm of the unseen, the unknown, the impossible, the future—that which perhaps lives with us every day but is invisible. It stretches those antennae into possibility space in order to pull—from Infinite Potentiality into finite actuality—the next supersize surprise, as Howard likes to call it, or, as we would call it, the next unique emergent of Cosmic Eros that is ready to emerge.

Everything is contained in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. Infinity is holding all of this in some fundamental way. Yet, it is radically new and emergent. And it is uniqueness that generates that emergence. Or in other words, the One generates uniqueness, and then uniqueness generates ever-greater depths of the One.

Complexity Theory and Simple First Principles and First Values

In the writings of mathematical genius Turing, particularly in his early anticipations of complexity theory, he stated that simple rules or laws iterated again and again generate coherent complexity. This is a core principle of exterior science.^[49]

In a similar fashion, simple first rules, or what we also call First Principles and First Values, generate exterior as well as interior structures of Cosmos. And by interiors we include quality, value, ethos, consciousness, and more. That is what we mean above when we said that simple First Principles and First Values are the plotlines of Cosmos.

Now, as we have seen, one of those First Values and First Principles is uniqueness. Cosmos follows its own inherent plotline. Cosmos evolves towards ever-more uniqueness.

So, for example, Reality manifests at the human level as Howard Bloom being unique. As we would say in CosmoErotic Humanism, Reality is having a Howard Bloom experience—or as Howard might say, Reality is becoming Bloomian. Howard is, of course, both interiors and exteriors.

Howard has, after all, a unique voiceprint, a unique psychological print, a unique fingerprint, a unique face, a unique DNA code, a unique physiological structure, and a unique cellular signature.

But Howard also has a unique taste, a unique perspective, unique gifts, unique allurements, unique pleasures, unique needs, unique needs he can address, a unique existential imprint, a unique quality of intimacy, a unique configuration of desire, and much more.

But none of these expressions of Howard-ness, interior or exterior, are disassociated from Cosmos. Howard’s Unique Self—and his self-reflective awareness of his uniqueness—is part of a larger storyline in Cosmos, which is the evolution of uniqueness.

The Anthro-Ontology of Uniqueness and Its Value

With this in mind, we return to Anthro-Ontology and particularly to the Anthro-Ontology of Uniqueness. In other words, Howard’s interior experience of his uniqueness, and his desire to perpetuate his unique gifts for the world, is not a confused ego inflation. Rather, Howard wants to make a unique contribution to the world. He has a direct sense of his own unique contribution. And he is ecstatically urgent about making that contribution. So, he organizes his entire life around this capacity to give that unique gift.

And actually, this is not merely a socially constructed expression of one epoch’s contrived emphasis on the individual. This is rather an expression of Reality having a Howard experience moving towards ever-deeper uniqueness. We realize that the sacred spark of Howard’s drive towards unique expression is Cosmos-as-Howard moving towards the fulfillment of its own value of uniqueness in the crystalline precious form of Bloom-ness.

Uniqueness as a Value in the Interior Sciences

In effect, we are noticing that this uniqueness is grounded in Cosmos itself. It is grounded in a Cosmic Story, in which one of the core plotlines is the evolution of uniqueness.

All of a sudden, when you put this together with the wider Field of some twenty or so other First Principles and First Values, we can begin to—perhaps for the first time in world history—universally—feel at home in Cosmos, but not through a regressive or non-regressive—premodern or postmodern—fundamentalist prism.

The realization of human uniqueness as a penultimate expression of the higher reaches of human expression is well formulated in the following passage from the writings of Abraham Kook, who speaks well for a large swath of the interior sciences:^[50]

Every person must know

that he is called to serve/work/worship

according to his unique way of knowing and feeling,

according to the root of his soul;

and in this world,

which includes countless worlds,

he will find the treasure of his life.

Let him not be confused

by contents flowing into him from foreign worlds

that he cannot properly absorb,

that he is unable to amalgamate into the assemblage of his life.

These worlds will find their mending in their place,

with those who are capable of building and improving them.

But he,

he must concentrate himself in his own worlds,

in his inner worlds,

which for him are filled with all

and encompass all.

A person is required to say: The world was created for me.

This modest greatness brings joy to a human being

and brings him to the higher wholeness which stands and awaits him.

And when he is striding on this confident way of life,

on his special path,

on his unique “way of the righteous ones”

he will be filled with the courage of life

and with spiritual joy

and over him the Light of God will appear.

From his own unique letter in Torah

there will emerge for him his splendor and his light.

The Evolution of Uniqueness: From Matter to Life to the Self-Reflective Human Mind to the Depth of Unique Self Realization

The evolution of uniqueness moves from matter to life to the depth of the self-reflective mind. Once we arrive at the depth of self-reflective mind, the evolution of uniqueness continues, as one of the core trajectories, one of the core plotlines, of Cosmos.

The evolution of uniqueness continues, until we disclose our true identities as Unique Selves, unique expressions of the Infinite Field of Love and Desire.

The evolution of uniqueness continues, until we disclose our true identities as Unique Selves, unique Outrageous Love Stories that are chapters and verses in the Universe: A Love Story.

The evolution of uniqueness continues, until we disclose our true identities as Unique Selves, Outrageous Love Letters written by Infinity to finitude.

Our Outrageous Love Stories—with all of our holy and broken Hallelujahs—are our personal Outrageous Love Letters—SWAK—sealed with a kiss—sent back to Infinity yearning to receive them.

Defining Uniqueness

One way to initially express uniqueness is as an emergent, unique distinction in the larger Field of Reality. Uniqueness is emergent in that it generates a radically new value—a quality that didn’t exist before, i.e., what Howard likes to call a supersize surprise.

So, uniqueness equals an emergent distinction in the larger Field of Reality, expressed as a radically new value and quality, which in turn generates new consciousness, new intelligence, or what we might also call new interiority.

Uniqueness Indicators at the Level of Quarks and Other Elementary Particles

One of the reality indicators of the emergent uniqueness is that there is what Howard likes to call a pickiness in subatomic attraction, which would seem to indicate some level of specificity—and uniqueness. Otherwise, they would all just promiscuously join each other. But the fact is that certain quarks shun certain other quarks and are attracted to certain other quarks.[51] That is a matter of unique taste.

Of course, their taste is built in and, in some sense, absolute. It is of course not like having a personal or unique taste at the human level, the way you have a personal taste, or I have a personal taste, where there, at least initially, seems to be a more evolved sense of choice. It is rather a proto form of unique taste, of who do you flee and who do you flock to? In other words, pickiness, or selectivity, in the subatomic world is an evolutionary indicator. In this sense, the emergence of quarks with their six unique forms and other elementary particles, at the very inception of Cosmos, is a key evolutionary moment in the history of uniqueness.

There are not a million different permutations and sub-permutations of quarks and other elementary particles. Rather, each elementary particle comes equipped with a very simple attraction-or-repulsion etiquette book that tells them who to run away from and who to rush towards. But if this were a six-monkeys-at-six-typewriters kind of random universe, there would be every possible permutation of these six kinds of quarks and the other elementary particles. Instead, an intentional Universe produced limited early expressions of uniqueness, which matched its own intention for an evolutionary trajectory with at least some general parameters.

The selectivity between the six unique forms of quarks, for example, are the differentiations or expressions of proto uniqueness that we observe in quarks.

A Holy Trinity of Eros: Uniqueness, Attention, and Allurement at the Level of Quarks

Another way to talk about the emergent uniqueness is through their capacity for attention. Attention, which itself is a First Principle and First Value [related to uniqueness], comes up really early in Cosmos.

There is a new capacity for attention, function, and integration, or what we might call a new Eros. We might also call this new capacity for attention a new interiority.

The early quarks and other particles are paying serious attention to each other; they are trying to figure out who to avoid and with whom to form a new intimate communion. That’s a big deal, and that takes attention.

There are, for example, six different kinds of quarks and their respective antiquarks. They also have different so-called color charges.[52] The quarks are figuring out, do I need to flee this particular quark, or do I need to erotically merge with it and make a family of three? Some of those groups of three become protons, and some of those groups of three become neutrons. The difference between a proton and a neutron is the unique configuration of intimacy, in each of them. Protons and neutrons are each composed of only two types of quarks—up quarks and down quarks—but with three different color charges. In other words, two up quarks and one down quark only come together to form a proton, if one of them has the color charge red, another the color charge green, and another the color charge blue—so, together, they have a neutral (or zero, or white) color charge.[53]

These quarks, however, are not dots in space; they are more like dancing points of energy, constantly moving around and in intimate conversations with each other. And, as Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek discovered, the quarks themselves seem to have no mass at all. Th­e mass of the protons and neutrons is made entirely from the kinetic energy of the quarks moving around. And that energy is, according to Einstein’s relativity theory, equivalent to mass.[54]

Quarks are extremely relational—so much so that we don’t encounter them by themselves anywhere in the known Universe. There are only three known ways in which quarks would not enter relationships:

• The first is in the creation of top quarks, which simply don’t live long enough to enter relationships. [Top quarks are the heaviest quarks that exist. They only have a mean lifetime of 5 × 10^-25 The strong nuclear force, however, takes some time to be transmitted via the gluons. There is a conversation that needs to take place for the relationship to happen. And the top quarks dissolve before they can enter that conversation.]
• The second is in the extreme conditions of the quark-gluon plasma in the very early Universe (in the very first microsecond after the Big Bang, before the quarks entered their committed relationships). [This is before the quarks even separated—or individuated—enough to enter relationships.]
• And the third is in the almost equally extreme conditions inside some neutron stars.[55]

In other words, for quarks, like for us, it is either love or die… They can only avoid intimate communion, which is in the mutual placing and receiving of attention, if they die.

It is precisely in this sense that the hijacking or homogenization of attention is a violation of an intrinsic structure of Cosmos. Attention is a very quality of Eros itself. Indeed, Eros itself, from one perspective, is the placing of attention.[56] Uniqueness is the emergence of a new capacity for attention and a new quality of Eros that allures new attention.

So, with this new factor of attention, we might upgrade our uniqueness equation. The uniqueness equation might now be formulated as:

Uniqueness = the emergent distinction of new value and quality in the larger Field of Reality, with new unique capacities to place and receive attention—coupled with new unique capacities to be alluring and autonomous, and to experience allurement and autonomy, relative to unique others.

Unique Attention at the Level of Protons

This same selectivity in attention exists at the level of protons. Not every proton, neutron, and electron are willing to get together—to place attention—with every other subatomic particle. They are actually unique in this precise sense. They are picky. Each of them has a unique place in the big-picture structures. Here is how Howard says it in his book The God Problem, p. 35:

A proton = a proton, right? Two protons are identical, n’est-ce pas? Not quite. Like the letter a in a Shakespearean sonnet, every proton has a unique place in big-picture structures. And that place in the big picture changes the proton’s role in the cosmos. Protons are participants in social processes. And those social processes help generate the radical differences between the swatches of space and the clumps of matter in this universe.

This ability of quarks and protons to place their attention and feel each other (by exchanging force-carrying bosons) is what Whitehead referred to as prehension, or what we call in CosmoErotic Humanism a kind of pan-interiority that lives very far down the evolutionary chain. It expresses itself as uniqueness and allurement at the levels of atoms, protons, and even, as we just saw, quarks.

Uniqueness, Need, Desire, and Value All the Way Down and All the Way Up the Evolutionary Chain

Uniqueness also implies another early value in the structure of Cosmos. Uniqueness implies need. And we can identify and trace the experience of need, which the particles have handed down to us, and which is very much alive in our human experience, to the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang.

That is fascinating by itself and evokes a core sentence of CosmoErotic Humanism.

Evolution is love in action in response to need.

So, need is in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. And need implies desire, and desire and need imply value. Quarks desire each other, they need other quarks to live and are thus of intrinsic value to each other and to life, or what we might call Reality itself.

This is all happening in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang. A few minutes later, as described in the implicit language of science, protons experience a longing and need for neutrons, and neutrons experience a need for protons, and they come together to create the first atomic nuclei—mainly heavy hydrogen and helium nuclei.[57]

And 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang, the atomic nuclei experience the need and desire for electrons to together create the first complete atoms—mainly hydrogen and helium. And it takes another 150-200 million years until these atoms come together in large clouds of gas—needing and desiring each other—and they finally form the first stars.

In the heart of the heaviest stars and their collapse into supernovae, even heavier atoms—like carbon, oxygen, and iron—have since been continuously produced.

Anthro-Ontology Emerges from Evolving First Principles and First Values

It becomes self-evident that need, desire, and value are also First Principles and First Values that go all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain with appropriate continuities and discontinuities. There is some shared participation, some continuity, in the experience of need, desire, and value, all the way down and all the way up the chain, because actually, those protons are living inside of us. And it is our experience of those quarks, protons, neutrons, and electrons, at obviously a higher and more evolved level, that constitutes key dimensions of our anthro-ontological experience.

We might say, for example, that the protons have handed this experience of Reality down to us. The protons of which we are made are 13.8 billion years old. They experienced need, desire, and value in the first fractions of a second of the Cosmos’s existence, and they have handed that quality down to us.

Commerce—with its supply and demand—is therefore not unique to us. Indeed, it goes back to the first nanoseconds of the Cosmos. It emerges when the first quarks emerged and desperately needed to avoid some other quarks, and desperately needed to form intimate communion with yet other quarks—attraction and repulsion.

However, with the emergence of the more evolved form of human beings, at this moment of meta-crisis, we have the capacity to move from unconscious to Conscious Evolution, which precisely includes the move from unconscious to conscious uniqueness, need, desire, and value.

The apex of human realization, what we have called in other writings on CosmoErotic Humanism the Fourth Big Bang,[58] is the human realization that we are irreducibly unique expressions of the LoveIntelligence and LoveDesire of Cosmos, the personal face of the evolutionary impulse, who is a conscious expression of the entire evolutionary process, what we have also called the fulfilment of Homo sapiens in Homo amor. And at the very core of Homo amor’s identity is the movement from unconscious to conscious uniqueness as an expression of the even deeper movement from unconscious to Conscious Evolution.

A Foreshadowing of More to Come in the History of Uniqueness: More Unique Autonomy = More Unique Communion

When two human beings become a couple, or a group of human beings come together in genuine communion—forming a communitas—a new intimacy, a unique shared identity in the context of otherness with mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose is generated.

When a person integrates aspects of their self—parts that were formerly split off from the depths of their being—creating a more robust and authentic autonomy, then, a new intimacy—a new, unique shared identity in the context of otherness with mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose—is generated.

When a person births new dimensions of their heretofore unrealized capacity and potential—interior or exterior—leading to greater autonomy, then, a new intimacy—a new, unique shared identity in the context of otherness, with mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose, is generated.

Said slightly differently:

When a person comes to know themselves ever-more deeply,

weaving into their new whole their split-off parts,

healing their trauma that caused the split,

and consciously recovering the depths of their irreducible uniqueness,

generating a more robust and authentic autonomy,

which itself is the vehicle for their unique Eros,

then, a new intimacy with self—

a new shared identity

with all their split-off parts—

in the context of otherness—

with mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose

between all the parts

is generated.

And expanding out,

when a unique nation or religion creates a new intimate communion—

based on a genuine sense of shared identity—

which, to sustain itself, as we have noted elsewhere,

must be rooted in a shared grammar of value,

then, a new intimacy,

a unique shared identity in the context of otherness

with mutualities of recognition, pathos, value, and purpose

is generated.

Intrinsic Uniqueness Emerging—From Quarks to Sex

There are two ways to talk about uniqueness. One is intrinsic uniqueness.[59] The other is contextual or relational uniqueness.

In the beginning, differentiation, or intrinsic uniqueness, is very, very limited.

There are only:

• six different forms of quarks (and a bunch of other elementary particles) and
• three unique forms of subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) that would later make up an atom and
• three different forms of atomic nuclei (of hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium) and
• three unique forms of complete atoms some 380,000 years later.

At the level of protons, we cannot speak of uniqueness in the same way that it appears later in Cosmos. There is a clear evolution of uniqueness all the way up the evolutionary chain. The protons themselves are pretty much identical—at least when seen from the outside. On the inside, there is this wild and unique movement and communication going on.

Similarly, the union they (only three minutes) later make up with neutrons and, still later, with electrons, brings forth at first only three unique atoms—hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium. However, all copies of each of these atoms themselves are basically identical atoms. They have no uniqueness of the kind that will emerge in the much later cellular world, and that of course defines the animal world, and in even more pronounced form the human world. [Again, the movement and conversations on the inside, which are responsible for the emergent properties of the different elements, literally defy our wildest imaginations.]

Glimmerings of what will later become Unique Self, however, begin to emerge long before cells. Fragrances of more evolved uniqueness begin to disclose more clearly when galaxies, planets, suns, and stars emerge, all of which are as unique as a fingerprint.

Then, along comes the biosphere with the first microbes, approximately 3.8 billion years ago, and there is an exponential explosion of ever-greater uniqueness.[60]

Then, roughly 1 billion to 2 billion years ago, Reality comes along and makes a major commitment to further the evolution of uniqueness—the emergence of what will become, at the apex of Conscious Evolution, the unique personal self. Reality does this through a system of reproduction that, if there was no value to uniqueness, might have easily been a copycat system, generating just exact copies. But instead, Reality chose, in its desire for ever-deeper value—ever-deeper Eros—which requires ever-deeper uniqueness—to manifest a dazzlingly complex process—perhaps the most dazzlingly complex process the Cosmos has ever seen.

Early prokaryotes, simple single-celled organisms without a nucleus, are already radically original, unique structures in Cosmos, well beyond anything that came before. So, we are already evolving towards ever-greater uniqueness.

But then emerged eukaryotes (cells with the nucleus—which actually first emerged from the intimate merger of several earlier prokaryotic cells[61]). And between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, we get from asexual to sexual reproduction.[62] And sexual reproduction is a momentous evolutionary leap towards the ultimate uniqueness commitment of Cosmos, to what we will come to call Unique Self.

Reality invents sexuality.

Why?[63]

Because Reality is making a commitment

to what will ultimately become

the evolution of ever-deeper, unique, individuated consciousness,

with a new capacity for meaning making and value,

which then participates in the generation

of ever-deeper and ever-more profound intimate communions.

In other words, uniqueness, and the LoveDesire that it generates and that generates it, is a crucial plotline in the Universe: A Love Story.

>>Read more in the PDF version of this essay<<

Footnotes

[1] The New Story of Value, which we have called CosmoErotic Humanism, is already evident in short form in the titles to multiple sets of forthcoming volumes. The first set of five volumes are called Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism—In Response to the Meta-Crisis. A short version, a kind of short recapitulation of the five volumes, is entitled From Homo Sapiens to Homo Amor: In Response to the Global Intimacy Disorder—The Meta-Crisis. Those volumes are then complemented by three additional volumes revolving around what we call the Intimate Universe. The Intimate Universe and what we have called the Tenets of Intimacy are in effect a particular door in. Their titles are: The Intimate Universe: Global Intimacy Disorder as Cause for Global Action Paralysis—From the Global Intimacy Disorder to the Intimate Universe and the Evolution of Intimacy and CosmoErotic Humanism—Toward the New Human and the New Humanity, and finally, Homo Amor—The Tenets of Intimacy and the Social Miracles, all by David J. Temple. Complimenting these two sets of volumes are two volumes exclusively devoted to the reconstruction of value—a New Story of Value embedded in First Principles and First Values—at the center of culture. One is already published, and the second is in preparation. Their titles are: David J. Temple, Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism: First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism—A New Metaphysics—Post-Tragic Memories of the Future (2023) and David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism: Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. See also the four-volume Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire by Dr. Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Dr. Kristina Kincaid, as well as God Loves Stores: First Notes on the Ontology of Story and the Narrative Arc of Reality. There are also two other key short volumes, both of which are equally important. The first short volume is entitled Global Intimacy Disorder as Cause for Global Action Paralysis: What the World Looks Like Sans First Principles and First Values and the second volume From Conspiracy Theory to the Great Conspiring of Reality—Information as Intimacy: Healing the Broken Information Ecology. Their topics are self-evident in their titles, so we will add but a word. In the first short volume, we paint a stark but highly realistic vision of the system collapse that will likely emerge if we fail to articulate and download a New Story of Value into culture. In the second short volume, we talk about the destruction of information as intimacy, and the destruction of the information ecosystem we need to be fully human, which is a direct result—again—of the failure to articulate an accurate Story of Value, which points towards some of the inherent plotlines of the drama of Cosmos—a drama in which human beings are today—more than we have ever been at any previous stage in history—the leading actors on the stage. All of these volumes taken together, articulate the key next steps, grounded in our earlier work over the last twenty years, in telling the emergent Story of Value, the New Story—rooted in the exterior and interior sciences—or the Universe: A Love Story. Together, these books form what we are calling the New Story of Value, in response to the meta-crisis. David J. Temple is a fictional personality created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as be part of the collaboration.

[2] See, for example, our colleague Yuval Harari, who explicitly embraces this postmodern view of story through his writing on history. See for example, Harari, Sapiens, Chapter 2 and Homo Deus, Chapter 7, where he explicitly writes that all stories are but social constructs, fictions, and figments of our imagination, and that no story is intrinsically better than any other story. A second important source, which, like Harari, is reflective of the leading-edge embrace of postmodern deconstruction into the fabric of society is Irvin Yalom’s classic Existential Psychotherapy, where he understands story in precisely this manner.

[3] Ibid, Harari and Yalom, who both embrace the deconstruction of value as well.

[4] We have written elsewhere of Story as a First Principle and First Value of Reality that runs all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. There we discuss the four core elements of story that define all stories—whether at the level of matter, life, or the depth of the self-reflective human mind. These four elements of story include: 1) Events that are not merely random but inherently connected in their unfolding. 2) The story has telos or direction—what we have called plotlines. 3) The plotlines are driven by inherent value and the desire for more value. 4) There is some degree of freedom in the story. See David J. Temple, Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism: First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism—A New Metaphysics—Post-Tragic Memories of the Future (2023) and David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism: Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. See also, our five-volume set on Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism—In Response to the Meta-Crisis.

[5] You may have noticed some unconventional deployments of capitalization. For instance, we distinguish between a reductionist cosmos and a living Cosmos, while also distinguishing the degraded sense of fuck and the Eros quality of Fuck through capitalization. We are also referring, for example, to all of Reality, God, Goddess, the Intimate Universe, the Amorous Cosmos, etc. This mode of capitalizing will continue through this and all of the correspondent volumes as both an expression of the author’s emphasis and also as an invocation of intrinsic Qualities of Eternal and Infinite Value into otherwise ordinary or degraded terms.

[6] The death star depicts a kind of Orwellian Totalitarianism of a kind of a closed society like it is enacted today in China, for example. There is however a more ostensibly covert totalitarianism, of the kind that is now gradually disclosing its nature in open societies, what we have called in other writings TechnoFeudalism, which seeks to enclose the world in a planetary stack, designed and monitored for maximum control, without the controlled even knowing that their freedom was forfeit.

[7] Ord, Toby (2020). The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. London: Bloomsbury.

[8] See Peter Zeihan, who advises energy corporations, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the U.S. military, in his book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization, HarperCollins, 2022. See also Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, Simon and Schuster, 2021.

[9] According to some historians, the existential fear of death was already present in hunter-gatherer societies. David Graeber in particular has correctly problematized the linear unfolding of hunter-gatherer to farming communities on several key accounts, showing conclusively larger organized gatherings with sophisticated religions appearing in the hunter-gatherer era. See David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2021.

[10] See Russell on Ethics, edited by Charles Pigden, London: Routledge, 1999, 165/Papers 11: 310–11.

[11] William Butler Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

[12] T.S. Eliot in his poem “The Hollow Men”:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
…
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion…

[13] To which we will return later in Meditation Fifty-One in Essay Three of this volume.

[14] See Marc Gafni, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Kristina Kincaid: Meditations on the New Narrative of Desire: Volume One, Introduction, Meditation Thirteen: “Every Crisis is a Crisis of Intimacy” and David J. Temple, The Intimate Universe: Global Intimacy Disorder as Cause for Global Action Paralysis—From the Global Intimacy Disorder to the Intimate Universe and the Evolution of Intimacy.

[15] The Oxford Languages dictionary defines a race to the bottom as a situation characterized by a progressive lowering or deterioration of standards, especially (in business contexts) as a result of the pressure of competition.

[16] We have noted in other writings of CosmoErotic Humanism that the modern and postmodern period are characterized by two paradoxical vectors, the evolution of value and the deconstruction of value. Both modernity and postmodernity are characterized by both movements—think, for example, of universal human rights and the rise of the feminine in modernity, and the reaching out to embrace and honor and protect marginalized communities in postmodernity. The evolution of value in both eras, however, was funded by social capital borrowed from premodernity—the traditional period. That social capital was the core common-sense sacred axiom that Value is Real. That loan was then deconstructed in postmodernity—which deconstructed the very Reality of Value itself as being anything more than a contrived social construct, a fiction, or a figment of our imagination.

[17] We use the term Eros in a very specific way, to which we will turn later: Eros is the experience of radical aliveness moving towards—seeking—desiring—ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. Eros in that sense is an evolving First Principle and First Value of Cosmos—meaning, Eros as a principle and value exists all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain, and yet, it evolves and takes on different forms on each emergent level. E.g., Eros between elementary particles is different from Eros between cells; and the Eros between dogs is different from the Eros between human beings.

[18] In the Love Story of the Universe, we refer to Love by many different names: Eros, Evolutionary Love, or Outrageous Love are names for the Love that is the Heart of Existence itself. That Love is Eternal, yet always evolving. It is the Love that drives evolution. It motivates the evolution of love itself. The Universe is a Love Story—not an ordinary love story but an Outrageous Love Story.

[19] The first form of existential risk is how the term is usually understood: Existential risk as the physical death of humanity—an extinction or near-extinction event. Likewise, catastrophic risk refers to events that will cause the death or extreme suffering of large segments of humanity.

[20] The second form of existential risk is equally threatening, but more insidious, harder to see, and thus harder to understand and fear. It speaks not of the physical death of humanity, but of the death of our humanity as persons. Humans might physically survive, but their humanity would be lost. This might be caused, for example, by a digitally mediated environment which speaks to the lowest common denominator of the human experience and effectively generates downgraded humans without any genuine free will, noble personhood, or dignity.

[21] See Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein, TechnoFeudalism: Turning the World into a Skinner Box—The Death of Value in the Digital Age, forthcoming. See also Dr. Marc Gafni & Dr. Zachary Stein, TechnoFeudalism as Thanos: From B.F. Skinner to the MIT Media Lab—A Deeper Dive, forthcoming.

[22] Mackey, John P. Conscious Capitalism Harvard Business Review Press; 1 edition (January 7, 2014).

[23] See, for example, “A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism” by Al Gore and David Blood, originally published in the Wall Street Journal, December 2011—https://algore.com/news/a-manifesto-for-sustainable-capitalism.

[24] See, for example, Mackey, John P. Conscious Capitalism Harvard Business Review Press; 1 edition (January 7, 2014), the section “The Cancer of Crony Capitalism”: “While free-enterprise capitalism is inherently virtuous and vitally necessary for democracy and prosperity, crony capitalism is intrinsically unethical and poses a grave threat to our freedom and well-being. Unfortunately, our current system has the effect of corrupting many honorable businesspeople, pushing them into becoming reluctant crony capitalists as a matter of survival.”

[25] It of course must be immediately declared, before even proceeding with one more sentence, that within this complex. there are tens of thousands of noble doctors, nurses, orderlies, technicians, administrative staff, and researchers, acting with their own radical integrity and self-sacrifice, inside of a broken and often corrupt system.

[26] See the article on Unique Self Health & Medicine by Drs. Venu and Vinay Julapalli: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/unique-self-health-medicine/. See also Outrageous Medicine: A Love Story: On Mom, Medicine, and Me, by V. Julapalli (forthcoming).

[27] The Great Reset Initiative is an economic recovery plan, launched in June 2020, drawn up by the World Economic Forum in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. WEF chief executive officer Klaus Schwab described three core components of the Great Reset: creating conditions for a stakeholder economy, building in a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable way, utilizing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics; and harness[ing] the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. See also Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry (July 9, 2020). COVID-19: The Great Reset. Agentur Schweiz. See also The Great Narrative: For a Better Future, Klaus Schwab with Thierry Malleret. Forum Publishing (2022). Schwab also wrote the preface to a 2010 report of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Redesign Initiative.” In it, he postulates that a globalized world is best managed by stronger multinational institutions. The term Great Reset is also used to refer to attempts to introduce what is called the New World Order. According to that theory, the WEF is planning to replace democracy with a model where a self-selected group of stakeholders make decisions on behalf of the people. The Transnational Institute, an international non-profit research and advocacy think tank founded in 1974 in Amsterdam, Netherlands, states that “we are increasingly entering a world where gatherings such as Davos” are “a silent global coup d’état” to capture governance. [“Davos and its danger to Democracy,” Transnational Institute. 18 January 2016. Retrieved 17 August 2021.] ***Zohar Writing

[28] See Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Macmillan USA, 2018.

[29] Brett Frischman, Evan Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity, Cambridge University Press, 2018.

[30] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019.

[31] A so-called operant conditioning chamber (also known as a Skinner box) is a laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior. It was created by B. F. Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. The chamber can be used to study both operant conditioning and classical conditioning. While Skinner’s early studies were done using rats, he later moved on to study pigeons. In his novel Walden Two, he describes a human community that is basically designed like a Skinner box for humans. ***Zohar Writing

[32] See David J. Temple, Reconstructing Value & Preserving Human Freedom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Exit the Silicon Maze Vol. 1 and Invisible Architects: Skinner, Pentland and the Hidden Blueprints for Techno-Feudalism: Exit the Silicon Maze Vol. 2, World Philosophy & Religion Press, 2026. See, in particular, the section “Rejecting Personhood and Individuality” in Parallel Six, which shows how both Skinner and Pentland deny the unique personhood of each individual and privilege the social as a source of meaning. For them, there is nothing inherently valuable about the person—and of course, they also deny the existence of any source or basis of value.

[33] Ibid. The intention of our work on Techno-Feudalism is to unpack these twenty-three principles that are currently guiding the creation of Skinner boxes in the contemporary social context, which provide the foundation for both Skinner’s work and the Social Physics of the MIT media lab. Refer specifically to the section “Living Laboratories as Euphemism for Skinner Box” in Parallel Sixteen, which unpacks all the ways both Skinner and Pentland euphemistically distort language to disguise (either consciously or unconsciously) their intentions.

[34] Gafni and Stein, TechnoFeudalism: Turning the World into a Skinner Box—The Death of Value in the Digital Age. See, in particular, Parallel One, which investigates how the influential methods and discourses of physics and data science are deployed by Skinner and Pentland to modify social behavior, deny the importance of individual uniqueness, and undermine the foundations of value.

[35] By divine individuation we are referring to the One becoming many, the undivided True Self expressing itself uniquely through each of our Unique Selves. Or said differently, Unique Self = True Self + unique perspective + unique quality of intimacy.

[36] Spencer, Herbert, First Principles, first published in London: Williams and Norgate, 1867, Chapter 15, Differentiation and Integration.

[37] In regard to all of our discussions of First Principles and First Value in this writing, please see our more in-depth conversations in David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism—Post-Tragic Memories of the Future and see also the fuller conversation in David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism—Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. Both published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, in Conjunction with Waterside Press and Integral Publishers, 2023. David J. Temple is a fictional personality created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as be part of the collaboration. In these volumes Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

[38] See Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates, Prometheus Books, 2012, pp. 255 ff., “IS METAPHOR A CRIME?”

[39] What we have called Anthro-Ontology is the capacity of the human being to directly access the Field of Consciousness, or what have also referred to as the Field of Value. Anthro-Ontology, which we have discussed in some depth in other writings, is premised on the empirical realization that we participate directly in the Field of Value. Value, or consciousness, lives in us. See also David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism—Post-Tragic Memories of the Future and see also the fuller conversation in the forthcoming David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism—Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. All published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, in Conjunction with Waterside Press and Integral Publishers. David J. Temple is a fictional personality created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as be part of the collaboration. In these volumes Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

[40] See, for example, James Vincent, senior reporter at The Verge, who writes in January 2023—in the article “Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers”: “These AI tools are vast autocomplete systems, trained to predict which word follows the next in any given sentence. As such, they have no hard-coded database of “facts” to draw on—just the ability to write plausible-sounding statements. This means they have a tendency to present false information as truth since whether a given sentence sounds plausible does not guarantee its factuality.”

[41] By the oracle of Open AI, we refer to the way it is often used: to provide an answer that can be trusted without further questioning—like the oracles of old.

[42] All of this was, of course, to be expected, as ChatGPT is basically, according to James Vincent, senior reporter at The Verge, in his article “Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers,” a vast autocomplete system, trained on billions of texts, predicting the next plausible sounding word, sentence, or paragraph. So, it reacts to the way the question is asked and basically regurgitates all the modern and postmodern platitudes it was trained with.

[43] Second simplicity refers to the third of three basic levels of thinking and feeling.
Level One, or first simplicity, includes the assumptions about the nature of life and identity that are loudly declared as givens by all dogmatic systems of spirit, science, and meaning. These assumptions often describe the world in black and white terms—good/bad, my side/your side, pure/impure, and godly/ungodly. They do not tolerate contradiction; they lack nuance and often ignore any information that undermines their premises.
Level Two is what we refer to as complexity. At this level, we see all the contradictions, alternative views, nuances, and dialectics at play, which we had ignored at Level One. The demarcating characteristics of Level Two are uncertainty and confusion, which generate action paralysis. Certainty in all its forms is mocked and dismissed as regressive and dangerous.
Level Three is what we call second simplicity. Second simplicity transcends and includes all of the complexity; but it is able to see through the thicket of complexity and discern the general outlines of a new meta-vision, a New Universe Story, which in turn births new narratives of identity, community, and power. Second simplicity embraces all of the uncertainty. It bows before the mystery, even as it articulates higher-order truths, which are rooted in new scientific insight and certainty. Second Simplicity integrates validated insights from all the different domains of wisdom at all the different levels of consciousness into a new narrative that presents its insights in second simplicity. The demarcating characteristic of second simplicity is inspired activation that moves with both radical humility and radical audacity. Second simplicity is responsible to the past and rooted in the present, all the while taking a courageous, joyful, and inspired stand for the future.

[44] Over time, we have formalized this equation as:

Eros = Radical Aliveness x Desiring (Growing + Seeking) x Deeper Contact x Greater Wholeness x Self Actualization/Self Transcendence (Creation [Destruction])

All our equations of interiors are not to be understood in quantitative terms. They are not technically equations in the mathematical sense. They are not intended to be used to quantify an amount of a particular value. This is not possible, because value is ultimately not quantifiable. It is a basic question, the extent to which the qualities of the interiors (value/consciousness) are in any way measurable, the way material realities are measurable. We don’t think they are. For example, asking someone to put a number on how much they love you, as compared to their dog, is absurd. While there are identifiable differences of intensity, there is no common metric that allows us to put a verifiable number on amounts of love (nor should there be!).

We are, of course, aware that, normally, a mathematical equation works with numerical values—even if it would be just 0 and 1—with 0 meaning that quality is not present, and 1 meaning it is present. Even though that is something we are able to say even for subjective qualities—at least for ourselves—and for ourselves, we may also be able to say that maybe a quality is only about halfway present—we are not using these equations in that way.

The equations are illustrative and suggestive of the structures and dynamics of the interiors. The intention is to find a way to capture the complexity and numinosity, as well as the generativity and definability, of cosmic values.

[45] See, for example, the section “The Empiricism of Love: The Three Eyes of Knowing—The Three Eyes of Eros—The Three Forms of Gnosis—The Three Eyes That Are One” and the appendix “Anthro-Ontology and the Three Eyes” in six-volume set: The Universe: A Love Story. See also David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values of Evolving Perennialism: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism—Post-Tragic Memories of the Future and see also the fuller conversation in the forthcoming David J. Temple, First Principles and First Values: Towards an Evolving Perennialism—Introducing the Anthro-Ontological Method. All published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, in Conjunction with Waterside Press and Integral Publishers. David J. Temple is a fictional personality created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as be part of the collaboration. In these volumes Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.

[46] Again, a more formal version of this equation reads:

Uniqueness = Emergent Distinction from Field of [Universal] Reality x Radically New Value (Quality + Consciousness) x New Capacity (Attention + Eros + Function + Integration)

[47] This is reflected in the intimacy equation of CosmoErotic Humanism, whose first clause is Intimacy = shared identity in the context of (relative) otherness. By otherness, we refer precisely to uniqueness. It is (relative) otherness because it is not the otherness of the alienated separate self or ego self. Rather, Unique Self is the unique expression of the larger Field. And in the larger Field, unique parties, or persons, participate in the larger Field of One Heart, One Love, One Value.

[48] This is how Howard Bloom often articulates it to Marc in their bi-weekly evolutionary and interior science dialogues, which were originally convened by Barbara Marx Hubbard. See also Howard’s book, The God Problem, for example on p. 173: “Are individual humans…also probes for a search engine of some kind? A search engine of our family, our tribe, our subculture, our nation, our species, or more peculiarly a search engine of the cosmos? …the fact is that differentiation…shows up all over the place in human behavior.”

[49] See, for example, Alan Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 237, No. 641. (Aug. 14, 1952), pp. 37-72—https://www.jstor.org/stable/92463. (We have added the bold italics above for emphasis.) In the abstract, he says: “The purpose of this paper is to discuss a possible mechanism by which the genes of a zygote may determine the anatomical structure of the resulting organism. The theory does not make any new hypotheses; it merely suggests that certain well-known physical laws are sufficient to account for many of the facts.” In section 3. Chemical Reactions, he states, “It has been explained in a preceding section that the system to be considered consists of a number of chemical substances (morphogens) diffusing through a mass of tissue of given geometrical form and reacting together within it. What laws are to control the development of this situation? They are quite simple.” He then lists several of these laws throughout his text, e.g.: “The diffusion follows the ordinary laws of diffusion… The reaction rates will be assumed to obey the ‘law of mass action’… The law of mass action must only be applied to the actual reactions… It should be noticed that the ideas of P-symmetry and F-symmetry as defined above apply even to so elaborate an entity as ‘the laws of physics’. It should also be understood that the laws are to be the laws taken into account in the theory in question rather than some ideal as yet undiscovered laws…”

Cultural Science writer Steven Johnson is, in this sense, not inaccurate, when he summarizes Turing in his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Scribner, Kindle-Version, (originally published in 2001) in the following manner: “Turing’s work on morphogenesis had sketched out a mathematical model wherein simple agents following simple rules could generate amazingly complex structures; perhaps the aggregations of slime mold cells were a real-world example of that behavior. Turing had focused primarily on the interactions between cells in a single organism, but it was perfectly reasonable to assume that the math would work for aggregations of free-floating cells.”—p. 15. And: “After a frustrating three-year stint at the National Physical Laboratory in London, Turing moved to Manchester in 1948 to help run the university’s embryonic computing lab. It was in Manchester that Turing began to think about the problem of biological development in mathematical terms, leading the way to the “Morphogenesis” paper, published in 1952, that Evelyn Fox Keller would rediscover more than a decade later. Turing’s war research had focused on detecting patterns lurking within the apparent chaos of code, but in his Manchester years, his mind gravitated toward a mirror image of the original code-breaking problem: how complex patterns could come into being by following simple rules. How does a seed know how to build a flower?”—p. 42.

[50] See Kook, The Light of Holiness.
On Uniqueness as a core structure of the interior sciences, see also for example, Gafni, Radical Kabbalah, volume one, part one, which is entirely dedicated to texts in this regard. There, we discuss both the uniqueness of the individual as an expression of the Divine Field as well as and the uniqueness of time. In the realization of the interior sciences discussed in that essay, every moment in time is possessed of a unique quality. The texts discussed are those of Mordechai Lainer, a Hassidic master in the mid-nineteenth century, who was a formative influence on Kook. On Lainer’s influence on Kook, see ibid, section seven.

[51] The same is true for other elementary and composite particles as well.

[52] Quarks have a color charge of red, green, and blue; and antiquarks have a color charge of antired, antigreen, and antiblue. All other particles have zero (or neutral) color charge. Red, green, and blue quarks come together in composite particles that have a neutral color charge (e.g., protons and neutrons (hadrons)). The same is true for antired, antigreen, and antiblue. And red and antired quarks, etc., also come together in neutrally color charged mesons. [Gluons, on the other hand, have mixtures of two colors, such as red and antigreen, as their color charge.]

[53] Up quarks have an electromagnetic charge of +2/3. Down quarks have a charge of -1/3. The sum of the charges of the quarks that come together to make up a nuclear particle determines its electrical charge. Protons contain two up quarks and one down quark (+2/3 +2/3 -1/3 = +1), and neutrons contain one up quark and two down quarks (+2/3 -1/3 -1/3 = 0).

[54] See “ESSAY; In the New Physics, No Quark Is an Island” in The New York Times, by M.I.T. physics graduate Dennis Oberbye, March 20, 2001.

[55] For a short story about that, see, for example, this popular 2019 article on Forbes, “Ask Ethan: Can Free Quarks Exist Outside Of A Bound-State Particle?” https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/08/03/ask-ethan-can-free-quarks-exist-outside-of-a-bound-state-particle/?sh=35e7e42137e6.

[56] Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking, desiring, moving towards, ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness. Ever-deeper contact also means the placing of attention. There is no contact without attention. And there is no wholeness without contact.

[57] That allurement between the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus is the only way that neutrons can survive for more than fifteen minutes without falling apart. A neutron that is not in intimate conversation with a proton will decay within fifteen minutes. In other words, the neutron really needs the presence of the proton in order to be itself. In the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang, a neutron on its own disintegrates. From what we know of neutrons today, it has a fifteen-minute life duration outside of the atom—outside of its relationship to a proton. If it does not establish a relationship, it loses its identity as a neutron and decays into a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. But when it creates a relationship with a proton it can last—as a neutron—billions of years. For more about this, see the section “Atoms and Higher Elements” below.

[58] We are borrowing the term from H. Rolston III, Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind, 2010, Columbia University Press, but we are introducing a fourth Big Bang. The First Big Bang is the Primordial Flaring Forth—the spontaneous explosion of something from nothing. The Second Big Bang refers to the emergence of life from (seemingly) lifeless matter. The Third Big Bang is the emergence of self-conscious awareness and human culture. And in what we have termed the Fourth Big Bang, evolution is becoming conscious of itself in a new way through human consciousness. For more on the Four Big Bang, see, for example, “Appendix 2: The Narrative Thread of Cosmos: The Evolution of Intimacy Through the Four Big Bangs” in Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Marc Gafni, The Rise of Evolutionary Relationships: The Evolution of Relationships—In Response to the Meta-Crisis. See also the five-volume set: Evolution: The Love Story of the Universe—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism—In Response to the Meta-Crisis. Both published by World Philosophy and Religion Press, in Conjunction with Waterside Press and Integral Publishers, 2023.

[59] What we refer to here as intrinsic uniqueness is a quality that is an aspect of the part (or the emergent whole) itself and can be observed or measured from the outside (by us). What happens on the inside of the whole—all the wild movement and conversation going on between the parts—is not observable for us. ***JACK

[60] Horizontal gene transfer, random mutations in their genome, genome duplication, transposition, symbiogenesis, epigenetics—processes that were ignored, understated, or sidelined by the now dead or dying neo-Darwinian orthodoxy of evolutionary science—are key to understanding the generation of ever-deeper uniqueness.

[61] While there is great agreement among biologists that eukaryotes first arose as the result of a merger of two prokaryotic cells—one of these which appears to have been a member of a subgroup of archaea, whereas the other partner appears related to alpha-proteobacteria—there are different theories about how exactly this merger happened. See, for example, Baum, B., & Baum, D. A. (2020). The merger that made us. BMC biology, 18(1), 72. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00806-3.

[62] Relationship births first mitosis and then meiosis into Reality. While mitosis, which is the process of cell division, is an earlier evolutionary emergent—all the different types of cells in a body can undergo mitosis—meiosis is the process of producing eggs and sperm in sexual reproduction.

[63] There is currently no consensus among biologists on questions like, how did sex in eukaryotes arise in evolution, what basic function did sexual reproduction serve, and why is it maintained, given the basic evolutionary disadvantages of sex, but it is clear that it evolved over 1.2 billion years ago. Among the most limiting evolutionary disadvantages of sexual reproduction is that an asexual population can grow much more rapidly with each generation than a sexual one. See, for example, Smith, J. Maynard (1978). The Evolution of Sex. Cambridge University Press.

[i] A colleague, Mauk Pieper, an excellent thinker in his own right, attended my (Marc’s) seminars themed around Your Unique Self in response to collective existential crises in Holland between 2009 and 2013. He published a book entitled Humanity’s Second Shock and Your Unique Self, 2014, Venwoude Press, for which I gladly wrote an afterword. Your Unique Self is the title of my core writing on this topic. He understood well the basic premise of our work—what I have called Unique Self Theory, meaning an emergent new theory of identity—an accurate response to what we call the first great question of CosmoErotic Humanism: Who Am I? Unique Self Theory as part of a larger Story of Value is crucial if we are to respond to the meta-crisis of the twenty-first century and beyond. Mauk coined the term second shock of existence, to capture the notion of existential risk, which we happily acknowledge. The term shock of existence seems to have been coined by philosopher Robert Creegan in his book by that name The Shock of Existence: A Philosophy of Freedom, by R. F. Creegan, 1954, Sci-Art Publishers. On Unique Self, see Gafni, Marc. Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with Introduction and Afterword by Ken Wilber, Integral Publishers, 2012. See also, Gafni, Marc [Guest Ed.]. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice 6:1, Special Scholarly Issue on Unique Self, Ed. Sean Esbjörn Hargens.